Gladius Dei
About this story
Munich is shining under a silk-blue June sky, and the crowd outside Blüthenzweig’s art shop keeps drifting back to a photograph in the window: a Madonna with bare shoulders and a heavy, sensual gaze, painted, the gossip goes, from the artist’s sweetheart, a little milliner. A gaunt young man in a black hood, Hieronymus, cannot get her out of his head. On the third night a voice from above sends him into the shop to demand that the picture be burned — then the statues, the vases, everything. Thomas Mann wrote “Gladius Dei” in 1901, the year Buddenbrooks appeared, twenty-eight years before his Nobel Prize. Its first words, “München leuchtete”, outlived the satire: since 1961 Munich has awarded a medal that carries them in the present tense, “München leuchtet”.
By the numbers
About the author
Thomas Mann (1875–1955), born in Lübeck and a Munich resident from 1894 until 1933, is the central German novelist of the twentieth century; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. His best-known works include the family saga Buddenbrooks (1901), the novella Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924). Driven out by the Nazis in 1933, he went on writing in exile in Switzerland and the United States and died in Zurich. “Gladius Dei” was written in 1901 after a journey to Florence, appeared in July 1902 in Hermann Bahr’s Viennese journal Die Zeit and was collected in Tristan (1903). A satire of Munich’s Renaissance-worshipping art trade, told through a young, Savonarola-like zealot, it is the companion piece to his only play, Fiorenza. Its opening words, “München leuchtete”, became a byword for the city: since 1961 Munich has named its civic medal “München leuchtet” after them.
Recognition
“Gladius Dei” marks an important step forward in a development that reached its first climax in Der Tod in Venedig.
Mann's story, often considered only a minor companion piece to the play Fiorenza, is significant in itself as a satire on the intellectual attitudes prevalent in Munich around 1900.
anticipates a kind of musical composition ... in which, as Leverkühn says, ‘there shall be nothing unthematic.’
“München leuchtete” (“Munich was shining”): with this quotation from the novella “Gladius Dei”, Thomas Mann expressed his ambivalent relationship with the city and its art scene. The famous dictum has long since shed its irony; the city now looks with pride on its art, theatre, music and literature.
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